GreenSeas shall advance the quantitative knowledge of how planktonic marine ecosystems, including phytoplankton, bacterioplankton and zooplankton, will respond to environmental and climate changes. To achieve this GreenSeas will employ a combination of observation data, numerical simulations and a cross-disciplinary synthesis to develop a high quality, harmonized and standardized plankton and plankton ecology long time-series, data inventory and information service.

The focus will be on capturing the latitudinal gradients, biogeographical distributions and provinces in the planktonic ecosystem from the Arctic, through the Atlantic and into the Southern Ocean. It will build on historical data-sets, and ongoing multidisciplinary ocean planktonic ecosystem monitoring programs, enhanced where possible with an emphasis on the Southern Ocean. GreenSeas will also enhance international cooperative links with other plankton monitoring and analysis surveys around the globe.

WP5 will improve the quantification of the uncertainty in simulations of the planktonic ecosystem. By building on existing global modelling programs GreenSeas will apply state-of-the-art medium-resolution Ocean Biogeochemical General Circulation Models (OBGCM) to integrate the information available in the data set and better constrain future projections of changes in ocean biogeochemical conditions; in doing so we will improve the understanding and quantification of model errors.

Making full use of data collected and collated by the project we will focus on hindcasting data rich periods and near-future climate scenarios.